Thursday, November 04, 2010

Angle Pair Nitty Gritty

As I was merrily going along teaching linear pairs and vertical angles and corresponding angles and such, it came to my attention that various students were not "there" yet with internalizing the pictures and definitions, so I came up with this activity:

I like the activities I've seen where sometimes the answer is "none" and sometimes there's more than one answer, and sometimes the answers are repeated in different questions. I've tried to incorporate that style into these problems. I think it worked pretty well.

I'm also giving them a quiz on 6 types of angle pairs for the next grading period. I told them they have to identify each angle pair correctly, and spelled correctly, and no abbreviations, and no doctor handwriting, and in a timed manner. If they miss ANY, they get a 0%, and they have as many tries in the next 6 weeks to get it 100% correct. I likened it to recognizing the letters of the alphabet. It sure would be a shame if they couldn't and/or it took them a long time to process the information. I restated the fact that geometry (math) is like a foreign language, and they have to have fluency with all the words.

In other funny news. A student whose grade is suffering and who came in for tutoring today and was actually grasping things said, "wow, I should really listen more in class because this makes so much sense."

Ackh! What are you doing up so early?? Isn't it like 3:40 or something there?

I use the drawing tools in Microsoft Word. I use the line, circle (reduced and filled) and the weird line thing where you can make connected segments, and they have a parallelogram picture you can expand and rotate and such.

I am using this worksheet right now and I think it is really helping my students see that things aren't always congruent. Even though I am through the chapter in the book that addresses this content, I am going back and having the students take a quiz on it next week. I like the idea of having to retake it, although I'm not sure how it would fly with my department if I did the 0% if they get any wrong. This may be an odd question, but is there any way you could email me the word doc so that I could change "same-side int." to "consecutive int." since that is what our book calls it and our state test?